The Enchantress of Florence

  No city is all palaces. The real city, built of wood and mud and dung and brick as well as stone, huddled beneath the walls of the mighty red stone plinth upon which the royal residences stood. Its neighborhoods were determined by race as well as trade. Here was the silversmiths’ street, there the hot-gated, clanging armories, and there, down that third gully, the place of bangles and clothes. To the east was the Hindu colony and beyond that, curling around the city walls, the Persian quarter, and beyond that the region of the Turanis and beyond that, in the vicinity of the giant gate of the Friday Mosque, the homes of those Muslims who were Indian born. Dotted around the countryside were the villas of the nobles, the art studio and scriptorium whose fame had already spread throughout the land, and a pavilion of music, and another for the performance of dances. In most of these lower Sikris there was little time for indolence, and when the emperor came home from the wars the command of silence felt, in the mud city, like a suffocation. Chickens had to be gagged at the moment of their slaughter for fear of disturbing the repose of the king of kings. A cartwheel that squeaked could earn the cart’s driver the lash, and if he cried out under the whip the penalty could be even more severe. Women giving birth withheld their cries and the dumb show of the marketplace was a kind of madness: “When the king is here we are all made mad,” the people said, adding, hastily, for there were spies and traitors everywhere, “for joy.” The mud city loved its emperor, it insisted that it did, insisted without words, for words were made of that forbidden fabric, sound. When the emperor set forth once more on his campaigns—his never-ending (though always victorious) battles against the armies of Gujarat and Rajasthan, of Kabul and Kashmir—then the prison of silence was unlocked, and trumpets burst out, and cheers, and people were finally able to tell each other everything they had been obliged to keep unsaid for months on end. I love you. My mother is dead. Your soup tastes good. If you do not pay me the money you owe me I will break your arms at the elbows. My darling, I love you too. Everything.

  Fortunately for the mud city, military matters often took Akbar away, in fact he had been away most of the time, and in his absences the din of the clustered poor, as well as the racket of the unleashed construction workers, daily vexed the impotent queens. The queens lay together and moaned, and what they did to distract one another, what entertainment they found in one another in their veiled quarters, will not be described here. Only the imaginary queen remained pure, and it was she who told Akbar of the privations the people were suffering because of the desire of overzealous officials to ease his time at home. As soon as the emperor learned this he countermanded the order, replaced the minister of works with a less dour individual, and insisted on riding through the streets of his oppressed subjects crying out, “Make as much racket as you like, people! Noise is life, and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.” The city burst into joyful clamor. That was the day on which it became clear that a new kind of king was on the throne, and that nothing in the world would remain the same.

  The country was at peace at last, but the king’s spirit was never calm. The king had just returned from his last campaign, he had slapped down the upstart in Surat, but through the long days of marching and war his mind wrestled with philosophical and linguistic conundrums as much as military ones. The emperor Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad, king of kings, known since his childhood as Akbar, meaning “the great,” and latterly, in spite of the tautology of it, as Akbar the Great, the great great one, great in his greatness, doubly great, so great that the repetition in his title was not only appropriate but necessary in order to express the gloriousness of his glory—the Grand Mughal, the dusty, battle-weary, victorious, pensive, incipiently overweight, disenchanted, mustachioed, poetic, oversexed, and absolute emperor, who seemed altogether too magnificent, too world-encompassing, and, in sum, too much to be a single human personage—this all-engulfing flood of a ruler, this swallower of worlds, this many-headed monster who referred to himself in the first person plural—had begun to meditate, during his long, tedious journey home, on which he was accompanied by the heads of his defeated enemies bobbing in their sealed earthen pickle-jars, about the disturbing possibilities of the first person singular—the “I.”

  The interminable days of slow equestrian progress encouraged many languid wonderings in a man of speculative temperament, and the emperor pondered, as he rode, such matters as the mutability of the universe, the size of the stars, the breasts of his wives, and the nature of God. Also, today, this grammatical question of the self and its Three Persons, the first, the second, and the third, the singulars and plurals of the soul. He, Akbar, had never referred to himself as “I,” not even in private, not even in anger or dreams. He was—what else could he be?—“we.” He was the definition, the incarnation of the We. He had been born into plurality. When he said “we,” he naturally and truly meant himself as an incarnation of all his subjects, of all his cities and lands and rivers and mountains and lakes, as well as all the animals and plants and trees within his frontiers, and also the birds that flew overhead and the mordant twilight mosquitoes and the nameless monsters in their underworld lairs, gnawing slowly at the roots of things; he meant himself as the sum total of all his victories, himself as containing the characters, the abilities, the histories, perhaps even the souls of his decapitated or merely pacified opponents; and, in addition, he meant himself as the apogee of his people’s past and present, and the engine of their future.

  This “we” was what it meant to be a king—but commoners, he now allowed himself to consider, in the interests of fairness, and for the purposes of debate, no doubt occasionally thought of themselves as plural, too.

  Were they wrong? Or (O traitorous thought!) was he? Perhaps this idea of self-as-community was what it meant to be a being in the world, any being; such a being being, after all, inevitably a being among other beings, a part of the beingness of all things. Perhaps plurality was not exclusively a king’s prerogative, perhaps it was not, after all, his divine right. One might further argue that since the reflections of a monarch were, in less exalted and refined form, doubtless mirrored in the cogitations of his subjects, it was accordingly inevitable that the men and women over whom he ruled also conceived of themselves as “we”s. They saw themselves, perhaps, as plural entities made up of themselves plus their children, mothers, aunts, employers, co-worshippers, fellow workers, clans, and friends. They, too, saw their selves as multiple, one self that was the father of their children, another that was their parents’ child; they knew themselves to be different with their employers than they were at home with their wives—in short, they were all bags of selves, bursting with plurality, just as he was. Was there then no essential difference between the ruler and the ruled? And now his original question reasserted itself in a new and startling form: if his many-selved subjects managed to think of themselves in the singular rather than plural, could he, too, be an “I”? Could there be an “I” that was simply oneself? Were there such naked, solitary “I”s buried beneath the overcrowded “we”s of the earth?

  It was a question that frightened him as he rode his white horse home, fearless, unvanquished, and, it must be conceded, beginning to be fat; and when it popped into his head at night he did not easily sleep. What should he say when he saw his Jodha again? If he were to say simply, “I’m back,” or, “It is I,” might she feel able to call him in return by that second person singular, that tu which was reserved for children, lovers, and gods? And what would that mean? That he was like her child, or godlike, or simply the lover of whom she too had dreamed, whom she had dreamed into being just as eagerly as he had dreamed her? Might that little word, that tu, turn out to be the most arousing word in the language? “I,” he practiced under his breath. Here “I” am. “I” love you. Come to “me.”

  One final military engagement disturbed his contemplation on the homeward road. One more upstart princeling to slap down. A diversi
on into the Kathiawar peninsula to quell the obstinate Rana of Cooch Naheen, a young man with a big mouth and a bigger mustache (the emperor was vain about his own mustache, and took unkindly to competitors), a feudal ruler absurdly fond of talking about freedom. Freedom for whom, and from what, the emperor harrumphed inwardly. Freedom was a children’s fantasy, a game for women to play. No man was ever free. His army moved through the white trees of the Gir forest like a silently approaching plague, and the pathetic little fortress of Cooch Naheen, seeing the advent of death in the rustling treetops, broke its own towers, ran up a flag of surrender, and begged abjectly for mercy. Often, instead of executing his vanquished opponents, the emperor would marry one of their daughters and give his defeated father-in-law a job. Better a new family member than a rotting corpse. This time, however, he had irritably torn the insolent Rana’s mustache off his handsome face, and had chopped the weakling dreamer into garish pieces—had done it personally, with his own sword, just as his grandfather would have, and had then retreated to his quarters to tremble and mourn.

  The emperor’s eyes were slanted and large and gazed upon infinity as a dreamy young lady might, or a sailor in search of land. His lips were full and pushed forward in a womanly pout. But in spite of these girlish accents he was a mighty specimen of a man, huge and strong. As a boy he had killed a tigress with his bare hands and then, driven to distraction by his deed, had forever forsworn the eating of meat and become a vegetarian. A Muslim vegetarian, a warrior who wanted only peace, a philosopher-king: a contradiction in terms. Such was the greatest ruler the land had ever known.

  In the melancholy after battle, as evening fell upon the empty dead, below the broken fortress melting into blood, within earshot of a little waterfall’s nightingale song—bul-bul, bul-bul it sang—the emperor in his brocade tent sipped watered wine and lamented his gory genealogy. He did not want to be like his bloodthirsty ancestors, even though his ancestors were the greatest men in history. He felt burdened by the names of the marauder past, the names from which his name descended in cascades of human blood: his grandfather Babar the warlord of Ferghana who had conquered, but always loathed, this new dominion, this “India” of too much wealth and too many gods, Babar the battle machine with an unexpected gift for felicitous words, and before Babar the murderous princes of Transoxiana and Mongolia, and mighty Temüjin above all—Genghis, Changez, Jenghis, or Chinggis Qan—thanks to whom he, Akbar, had to accept the name of mughal, had to be the Mongol he was not, or did not feel himself to be. He felt…Hindustani. His horde was neither Golden, Blue, nor White. The very word “horde” struck his subtle ears as ugly, swinish, coarse. He did not want hordes. He did not want to pour molten silver into the eyes of his vanquished foes or crush them to death beneath the platform upon which he was eating his dinner. He was tired of war. He remembered the tutor of his childhood, a Persian Mir, telling him that for a man to be at peace with himself he must be at peace with all others. Sulh-i-kul, complete peace. No Khan could understand such an idea. He did not want a Khanate. He wanted a country.

  It wasn’t only Temüjin. He also sprang by direct descent from the loins of the man whose name was Iron. In the language of his forefathers the word for iron was timur. Timur-e-Lang, the limping iron man. Timur, who destroyed Damascus and Baghdad, who left Delhi in ruins, haunted by fifty thousand ghosts. Akbar would have preferred not to have had Timur for a forebear. He had stopped speaking Timur’s language, Chaghatai, named after one of the sons of Genghis Khan, and adopted, instead, at first Persian and later also the bastard mongrel speech of the army on the move, urdu, camp-language, in which half a dozen half-understood tongues jabbered and whistled and produced, to everyone’s surprise, a beautiful new sound: a poet’s language born out of soldiers’ mouths.

  The Rana of Cooch Naheen, young, slender, and dark, had knelt at Akbar’s feet, his face hairless and bleeding, waiting for the blow to fall. “History repeats itself,” he said. “Your grandfather killed my grandfather seventy years ago.”

  “Our grandfather,” replied the emperor, employing the royal plural according to custom, for this was not the time for his experiment with the singular, this wretch did not merit the privilege of witnessing it, “was a barbarian with a poet’s tongue. We, by contrast, are a poet with a barbarian’s history and a barbarian’s prowess in war, which we detest. Thus it is demonstrated that history does not repeat itself, but moves forward, and that Man is capable of change.”

  “That is a strange remark for an executioner to make,” the young Rana said softly, “but it is futile to argue with Death.”

  “Your time has come,” the emperor assented. “So tell us truthfully before you go, what sort of paradise do you expect to discover when you have passed through the veil?” The Rana raised his mutilated face and looked the emperor in the eye. “In Paradise, the words worship and argument mean the same thing,” he declared. “The Almighty is not a tyrant. In the House of God all voices are free to speak as they choose, and that is the form of their devotion.” He was an irritating, holier-than-thou type of youth, that was beyond question, but in spite of his annoyance, Akbar was moved. “We promise you,” the emperor said, “that we will build that house of adoration here on earth.” Then with a cry—Allahu Akbar, God is great, or, just possibly, Akbar is God—he chopped off the pompous little twerp’s cheeky, didactic, and therefore suddenly unnecessary, head.

  In the hours after he killed the Rana, the emperor was possessed by his familiar demon of loneliness. Whenever a man spoke to him as an equal it drove him crazy, and this was a fault, he understood that, a king’s anger was always a fault, an angry king was like a god who made mistakes. And here was another contradiction in him. He was not only a barbarian philosopher and a crybaby killer, but also an egotist addicted to obsequiousness and sycophancy who nevertheless longed for a different world, a world in which he could find exactly that man who was his equal, whom he could meet as his brother, with whom he could speak freely, teaching and learning, giving and receiving pleasure, a world in which he could forsake the gloating satisfactions of conquest for the gentler yet more taxing joys of discourse. Did such a world exist? By what road could it be reached? Was there such a man anywhere in the world, or had he just executed him? What if the Rana of the mustache had been the only one? Had he just slain the only man on earth he might have loved? The emperor’s thoughts grew vinous and sentimental, his eyes blurring with drunken tears.

  How could he become the man he wanted to be? The akbar, the great one? How?

  There was nobody to talk to. He had ordered his stone-deaf body-servant Bhakti Ram Jain away, out of his tent, so that he could drink in peace. A body-servant who could not hear his master’s ramblings was a blessing but Bhakti Ram Jain had learned to read his lips now, which undid much of his value, making him an eavesdropper like everyone else. The king is mad. They said that: everyone said that. His soldiers his people his wives. Probably Bhakti Ram Jain said that as well. They did not say it to his face, for he was a giant of a man and a puissant warrior like a hero out of the ancient tales, and he was also the king of kings, and if such a one wished to be a little nutty then who were they to argue. The king, however, was not mad. The king was not content with being. He was striving to become.

  Very well. He would keep his promise to the dead Kathiawari princeling. In the heart of his victory city he would build a house of adoration, a place of disputation where everything could be said to everyone by anyone on any subject, including the nonexistence of God and the abolition of kings. He would teach himself humility in that house. No, now he was being unfair to himself. Not “teach.” Rather, he would remind himself of, and recover, the humility that was already lodged deep in his heart. This humble Akbar was perhaps his best self, created by the circumstances of his childhood in exile, clothed now in adult grandeur but still present nonetheless; a self born not in victory but in defeat. Nowadays it was all victories but the emperor knew all about defeat. Defeat was his father. Its name wa
s Humayun.

  He didn’t like thinking about his father. His father had smoked too much opium, lost his empire, only got it back after he pretended to become a Shiite (and gave away the Koh-i-noor diamond) so that the King of Persia would give him an army to fight with, and then died by falling down a flight of library stairs almost immediately after he regained his throne. Akbar didn’t know his father. He himself had been born in Sind, after Humayun’s defeat at Chausa, when Sher Shah Suri became the king Humayun should have been but wasn’t capable of being, and then off the deposed emperor scurried to Persia, abandoning his son. His fourteen-month-old son. Who was found and raised by his father’s brother and enemy, Uncle Askari of Kandahar, wild man Uncle Askari who would have killed Akbar himself if he could ever have got close enough, which he didn’t, because his wife was always in the way.

  Akbar lived, because his aunt wanted him to.

  And in Kandahar he was taught about survival, about fighting and killing and hunting, and he learned much else without being taught, such as looking out for himself and watching his tongue and not saying the wrong thing, the thing that might get him killed. About the dignity of the lost, about losing, and how it cleansed the soul to accept defeat, and about letting go, avoiding the trap of holding on too tightly to what you wanted, and about abandonment in general, and in particular fatherlessness, the lessness of fathers, the lessness of the fatherless, and the best defenses of those who are less against those who are more: inwardness, forethought, cunning, humility, and good peripheral vision. The many lessons of lessness. The lessening from which growing could begin.